![]() ![]() He sat with a friend, right at the back, and as he watched the film, "he laughed his ass off". Wearing shades, he was smuggled into the cinema shortly after the lights had dimmed. He was clean-shaven, smartly dressed, and had lost a lot of the weight he had been carrying for the last two years. It is claimed that some time before the film started, Phoenix arrived by vaporetto at the nearby Excelsior hotel. One particular story, from a very reliable source, is especially interesting. Later, though, rumours start to circulate that the film isn't quite everything it seems. After all, the posters outside show the once-lithe Phoenix looking bearded and wired, and as the candid, sometimes shocking film unfolds, they start to understand why he would want to stay away. The crowd is pretty disappointed but sympathetic. But for I'm Still Here, the long-awaited documentary charting actor Joaquin Phoenix's very public meltdown of 2008, only the film's director, Casey Affleck, emerges to take his seat in the empty top-tier row. Or is I'm Still Here a brilliantly sustained if embarrassing faux-documentary criticising the cult of celebrity, the media and a gullible public? Suspicions were raised by the credit to Phoenix and Affleck as co-writers and producers, and now Affleck has confirmed it was a hoax.The Sala Grande at the Venice film festival has seen some pretty big arrivals in its time, perhaps most famously in 2004 when the 17-strong delegation for The Merchant Of Venice left its star, Al Pacino, with nowhere to sit. He twice dropped out of acting, just before and after his younger brother River Phoenix's sensational death. Is this a genuine exercise in cinéma vérité, cruelly observing the public and private unwinding of a deeply disturbed man incapable of handling his career? After all, Phoenix had a troubled upbringing by a footloose hippy couple, members of a religious cult, whose five children supported them by performing in the streets as they drifted around North and South America. It concludes on a sad, would-be tragic note as he's filmed walking into the deepening water of a river in Central America. The final indignity comes when he's dragged off the stage after fighting with a mocking audience in Miami and vomits profusely. He makes an idiot of himself on David Letterman's TV show and is satirised at the 2009 Oscar ceremonies by Ben Stiller. He coaxes rap star Sean "P Diddy" Combs into supporting his career but performs appallingly on stage. We see him grow an unruly beard, put on weight, hire hookers on his computer, smoke grass, snort cocaine, down prodigious quantities of alcohol, meditate on fame and the dishonesty of acting, and obscenely abuse his paid assistants, one of whom takes his revenge by defecating on his sleeping employer's face. This incident kicks off I'm Still Here, the somewhat chaotic documentary by his brother-in-law, the actor Casey Affleck, chronicling Phoenix's increasingly erratic conduct over the following year. ![]() In October 2008, the twice-Oscar-nominated, 34-year-old movie star Joaquin Phoenix told his fellow performers at a benefit concert that he'd decided to retire from acting and concentrate on a new career as a rap singer. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |